


The Dark Side of the Morning

by theprincessandtheking



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Post-Mount Weather, Seriously guys there's a lot of angst here, canonverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-27
Updated: 2017-03-27
Packaged: 2018-10-11 09:37:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10461774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theprincessandtheking/pseuds/theprincessandtheking
Summary: It isn’t the first time Bellamy has found a sword pressed to his throat, and God knows it probably won’t be the last. At this rate, his neck is going to be one massive scar before the year is up.But the metal Bellamy feels into his neck is not the sharp edge of a blade. It is the ghost of the cold band of the collar that restrained his desperate attempts to escape. The collar that held him in place as he was doused in chemicals that set his skin on fire and stabbed with more needles than he could count. Blood rushes in his ears and he squeezes his eyes close, trying to shut out the memories that have haunted him since he’d left Mount Weather, his heart pounding so hard he swears the whole room can hear it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank you to my pals @bellamylovedlincoln and @bellamyblakesgun on tumblr, as well as youovercomeit on AO3/tumblr for your support on this fic! 
> 
> Seriously, this thing was a pain in the ass to write, but it's finally done. Enjoy!

It isn’t the first time Bellamy has found a sword pressed to his throat, and God knows it probably won’t be the last. At this rate, his neck is going to be one massive scar before the year is up.

But the metal Bellamy feels pressing into his neck is not the sharp edge of a blade. It is the ghost of the cold band of the collar that restrained his desperate attempts to escape. The collar that held him in place as he was doused in chemicals that set his skin on fire and stabbed with more needles than he could count. Blood rushes in his ears and he squeezes his eyes close, trying to shut out the memories that have haunted him since he’d left Mount Weather, his heart pounding so hard he swears the whole room can hear it.

“Don’t,” Clarke barks from across the room, Kane’s arm visibly straining to detain her from advancing any further. “We can work this out. We just need a little more time.”

“Skaikru has been given plenty of time,” Roan growls lowly, his hand coiling tightly in Bellamy’s hair and pulling so hard it makes his eyes water. “And still you have nothing. No solutions, no more time.”

Bellamy hardly pays attention to the exchange around him as one flashback after another crashes over him, like waves on a stormy sea that won’t let him up for air before a new one is upon him. His breath rasps in his throat, his eyes darting back and forth with panic, and he sees Clarke’s expression darken. He can tell she knows something is wrong, can see her brows furrow in concern, asking him a silent question to which she only receives a shake of his head in response.

His body trembles in fear of a threat long past, and is own pulse is so loud in his ears that he nearly can’t make out most of the words formed by Clarke’s mouth.

“You don’t understand,” he hears her say over the roar, “the nightblood is ready. We just have to administer it, and we can only do that with _your_ help.”

“But only after you give it to your own people first.”

Bellamy sees Clarke’s mask of confident reassurance falter, her eyes betraying her in a way that he doubts anyone else notices. Her jaw tightens with anxiety, the gears turning in her head almost audibly. He forces himself to focus on only her gaze, his eyes grasping for the blue of her own and centering himself with it. She meets his stare once more, and he feels his heartbeat begin to slow slightly as he gives her a small nod of encouragement that pulls against the hair in the Ice King’s grip.

Clarke swallows, her chin jutting forward the way he’s noticed it does when she forces herself to be brave.

“Alright,” she says, extending her palms calmly. “You and fifty of your people will be the first to receive the nightblood treatments in two days.”

“ _One hundred_ of my people,” Roan counters, and his tone makes it clear that he does not stand open for negotiation.

Clarke’s eyes close and she takes a long breath through her nose.

“One hundred of your people.”

The room is silent.

Finally, Roan removes the sword from Bellamy’s neck and shoves him forward forcefully, sending him stumbling onto shaking hands. In seconds she is there, her hands much gentler than the Ice King’s, slipping behind his elbow to help him stand.

“My servants will show you to your chambers,” Roan informs them gruffly as he gestures to two young boys in the corner of the room. At his command, they part to open a large set of wooden doors, revealing a long corridor. “You will stay until morning.”

Clarke’s eyes find Bellamy’s and he gives her a small nod of reassurance, placing a hand against the small of her back to give her an encouraging nudge toward the doorway. She obliges, and Kane and Miller follow them into the stone passageway. Firelight from the torches that line the walls casts a flickering glow over their surroundings, creating an ambiance that feels more threatening than cozy.

He can feel Clarke’s eyes on him, searching his face for an explanation for his odd behavior a few minutes earlier. He gives her a nearly imperceptible shake of his head. _Not now_.

She seems to understand, because her gaze returns to the boys that lead the group. They walk for several minutes, making turn after turn in the maze of the Ice Nation palace, and Bellamy wonders what use this place served before the bombs. He vaguely registers that they’re in a different wing of the massive building when they finally come to a stop.

 

Some time later, Bellamy finds himself alone on a fur-covered bed in a room adjacent to Clarke’s, Miller and Kane in their own quarters just across the hall. Flames crackle in the fireplace in the corner of the room, but he feels none of their warmth. He squeezes his eyes shut, hoping it’ll also shut out the images that play through his head on a loop.

_He is cold and tired and hungry and all he hears is the sound of the metal links of the chains that bind his feet._

_He is burning alive as the man circles around him with a hose that pelts him with liquid fire._

_He is choking on the metal tube they shove into his mouth to force down the pill that will make his stomach heave, and he’s not sure how he still has anything left in his stomach to vomit._

_He is gritting his teeth as a needle bites into the crook of his elbow and plunges far deeper than metal was meant to be in a body._

_He is screaming as the wires of the brush dig into his skin like a thousand tiny knives that slice through him as though he is butter, and now he understands why it was best that Finn died the way he did._

A soft rap on his door breaks through his thoughts. Concrete limbs pull him from the bed and trudge toward the door. He leans his head against the solid oak and closes his eyes to steady himself, shoulders heaving with his breath. The few seconds aren’t nearly enough to calm his racing heart, but he turns the knob with shaking hands anyway.

Clarke stands before him, dressed down to a thin sleep shirt and warm pants very similar to the ones he found waiting for him on his own bed. Her hair glows in the dim lighting, the glimmer of firelight bringing forth the gold that weaves through her curls.

“Hey,” he says, his voice hoarse.

Her smile is soft.

“Hey,” she says, her fingers slipping up to fiddle with the collar of her shirt. “I’m sorry, did I wake you? I couldn’t sleep, and I just thought—"

“I was awake,” he assures her, stomach clenching with the reminder of his train of thought just moments ago. He steps aside, allowing her small frame to pass through the doorway. The door closes softly behind him as he turns to follow, heavy wood hitting stone with a soft _thud_.

Clarke hesitates, her footsteps unsure before she advances to the bed in front of her and takes a seat. She tucks her legs beneath her and rests her elbows on her knees, her unfocused gaze fixed on the fire across the room.

The flickering light of the fire shadows her face, hollowing out her cheeks and sharpening the line of her jaw. Bellamy knows that the last few months—ALIE, the radiation meltdown, the never-ending struggle for peace with the Grounder clans—have taken their toll on her, but it in that moment it hits him just how heavy the weight of the world has been on her shoulders. Two small creases have taken up permanent residence between her brows, and her dark lashes brush against purple circles with every blink. She’s lost weight, her body looking unusually thin—not frail, Clarke would never seem frail to him—and he tries to remember the last time he saw her eat a full meal before being called off to deal with some new situation. Nothing comes to mind.

As if taking her cue from his thoughts, she releases a heavy sigh, her head dropping to her chest as she runs a hand haggardly over her face. His feet carry him toward her automatically. He sits beside her, leaving a space between their shoulders that makes his heart ache with want. Her hand rests next to his hip, palming and threading her fingers the soft fur that tops the bed absentmindedly.

“One hundred people,” she whispers, and Bellamy isn’t sure if she’s talking to him or herself. “At the rate my mom and Raven are producing nightblood, we were only _barely_ going to have enough to treat Arkadia.”

He stays quiet—after all, what is there to say, really—knowing that she needs to process, needs to breathe. She isn’t looking for an answer, never is, only looking for someone to share the burden with, a task that he is well-versed in and welcomes with weary but open arms. When she finally shifts her gaze from the fire to meet his own, he sees the tears in her eyes that glisten with the glow of the flames.

Something inside of him breaks a little at the sight, and surprise steals the breath from his lungs as he realizes that he didn’t know there was anything left of him still intact. But he supposes that Clarke Griffin has always had a way of bringing out the parts of him that are most whole, most _him_.

He’d take the entirety of every single one of her burdens if she’d let him.

“I killed a hundred of our people today,” she says, and the look she gives him, the guilt in her expression, makes his stomach clench.

Bellamy lays his hand over hers without thinking, the one that remains by his side, now clenching the fur beneath them so tightly it makes her knuckles whiten.

“Clarke,” he says, and at his voice she looks back toward the fire, biting her lip in a way that almost prevents him from seeing it tremble. And _fuck_ if the quiver of her chin doesn’t grip his insides like a vice, and suddenly his hand is reaching for it, tucking two fingers beneath her jaw to turn her face back to him, because he _needs_ her to understand his words. “Look at me.” He meets her eyes with intensity, swallowing hard as he continues, “You did what you had to do. You and I both know Roan wasn’t planning on letting us walk out of here without agreeing to anything less than what we promised.”

She shakes her head, her lips parting in protest, but he cuts her off before she can respond.

“ _No_ , Clarke. Listen to me. As soon as he killed us, he’d have sent armies to attack Arkadia, no warning, no mercy.” He watches as she squeezes her eyes shut tightly, feeling her jaw clench beneath the fingertips that still graze her skin. “You didn’t kill our people today. You saved hundreds of them.”

She seems to lose the battle with her trembling lip, and he feels it shake beneath his touch. A tear slips down her cheek that he pushes away with his thumb, only to be rewarded with a watery smile that tugs at his chest. The hand that still covers her fist between them goes to work at uncoiling her grip, gently tugging at her fingers one by one until she no longer clings to the fur like a lifeline.

He doesn’t know how long they sit like that, hands entwined with his hand cradling the soft skin of her jaw. They say nothing, air filled with a softness and something else that takes Bellamy significant effort not to read into, and her breath grows less shaky as time passes.

A frown pulls at the corners of her mouth suddenly.

“What happened out there today?”

Bellamy tenses.

“What do you mean?” he asks, and he hopes she doesn’t notice the dread he hears in his own voice.

“You know what I mean,” she says, and he feels her fingers begin to trace small circles into the skin of his palm. “With Roan. I’d never seen you look that… _terrified_.”

And he _wants_ to tell her, _shit_ , he wants to tell her everything. He wants to tell her about the betrayal he felt when Lincoln handed him over to the people of Mount Weather, the guilt that tore through his chest at the knowledge Bellamy had sent him in there when he knew Lincoln wasn’t ready. He wants to tell her that he’d never been as scared in his life as he had been when he passed cart after cart of the dead and dying as they dragged him through those tunnels. He wants to tell her about every stab of a needle, every excruciating chemical, every brush that ripped at his skin like sandpaper stripping paint from wood, leaving behind something damaged, something raw and exposed.

But mostly he wants to tell her that through all of it, all of the pain and the fear and the desperation, he found hope in the thought of seeing blonde hair and blue eyes again. He found strength in the knowledge that Clarke needed him, and he’d be damned if he let her down.

His shoulders slacken of their own accord, but he shakes his head anyway.

“Well forgive me if having a sword to my throat makes me a little anxious,” he teases, and he hopes the joke will pacify her, tell her that he’s okay, that he didn’t spend the evening reliving that moment over and over again in his head.

“Bellamy.”

Her tone is sharp, but he can hear the concern woven into it. Her lashes flutter slightly as she scans his face imploringly, lips parted with words neither of them know how to say.

He doesn’t mean to say it, really, at least not out loud. Because he knows how this conversation will end, knows that Clarke will blame herself for all of it. She will shoulder this burden, too, though at the end of the day she only made the call that he would have made, too, had he been in her position. But something about the way her hand tightens around his, the way she begs to understand without even saying a word has the words falling from his lips before he can stop himself.

“It wasn’t Roan,” he says, and though he avoids meeting her eye he knows the creases between her brows have deepened in confusion. “I mean, it wasn’t—It wasn’t the blade that made me panic.”

He rakes a hand through his tangled curls, sucking in a shaky breath as he takes a moment to prepare himself to tell his story. She doesn’t press him, and he has never appreciated that aspect of her personality so much, and he trails his thumb over the back of the hand that still rests in his as a silent thank you.

“I still—,” he stammers, his eyes shutting tightly as he forces the words out. “Sometimes I still have flashbacks of Mount Weather.”

He feels Clarke tense beside him, but she says nothing, waiting for him to continue.

“They used to be a lot worse. I used to have them all the time. Today was the first I’ve had in a while, actually,” he adds, his hand sliding from his hair to rub gingerly at his neck. “What happened in there was just…I don’t know, a trigger, I guess.”

Clarke takes in a sharp breath, and Bellamy allows himself to meet her gaze. Her eyes shift from his face to the hand that rests on the skin just above his collarbone. Her lips part with recognition and she lifts a hand of her own, hesitating slightly before bringing it to his neck. He flinches reflexively at the touch, a ghost of the panic he felt earlier coming to the surface. But Clarke’s fingers are far kinder than the collar of Mount Weather or the sharp edge of Roan’s sword. Her knuckles flutter feather-light over the thrum of his nervous pulse, and he swallows hard as he focuses on her touch, the breath that fans across his cheek, shoving away the memories that threaten to overtake him again.

“Bellamy,” she whispers, distress seeping through his name. “What did they do to you?”

And so he tells her. Against his better judgment, he tells her everything. He tells her about the collar that he still feels around his neck when shrugs on his guard jacket. He tells her about the unending pills, injections, and chemical baths. He tells her about the sound of his blood pounding in his ears as he hung by his feet, life draining from his body by the second, sending a thudding through his head that he can still hear when he lies alone in bed at night. He tells her about the way the cold of the metal cage’s floor seeped into his skin, yet did nothing to numb him against the screams of the hundreds around him, each suffering as he was.

Through it all, Clarke—beautiful, strong, gracious Clarke with a compassion that has stunned him from the moment the drop ship door opened—says nothing. She merely listens intently, occasionally giving his hand a squeeze of encouragement when the acid that burns at the back of his throat threatens to silence him. And when he is finished, she doesn’t prod, doesn’t interrogate him with the dozens of questions he has no doubt are in the back of her mind. She takes what he chooses to share with gratitude and asks nothing more of him. She leans her head against his shoulder, one hand stroking his arm and the other still wrapped securely around his, and they sit in silence for what feels like a lifetime as she processes his words.

When she finally speaks, her quiet voice shakes with tears he can’t see.

“How did you do it?” she asks, the soft rasp echoing off the stone walls. She lifts her head from his shoulder, and though he takes comfort in seeing her tear-stained face, his skin is cold with the loss of her touch. “How did you keep fighting?”

 “I had a job to do,” he tells her. He swallows hard. “People were counting on me.”

Her eyes widen at his words, and at last it registers that the tears that trail down her cheeks are not for the guilt she feels for sending him, but for the pain he endured, the pain she believes she had a hand in dealing. But she does not seek his comfort, and her eyes do not plead for him to offer her reassurance, to tell her that she made the right call. Instead she only silently asks for him to give her this burden, to let her be his strength and solace the same way he has been for her time and time again.

Because they are Bellamy and Clarke, and the burdens they shoulder are each other’s, have always been each other’s. And they will continue to share them for as long as the other will allow, because the weight of the world doesn’t seem so heavy when you have someone to carry it alongside you.

And so when Clarke leans forward to press his lips to hers, he feels only a tinge of hesitation, only spends a moment worried that she does so to assuage the remorse inside of her before he understands. It is not an apology warm on his mouth; it’s a reminder that she is there, that she will never leave him again to carry this world alone, that she will help him get through this the way they will get through everything life has thrown at them: together.

He responds softly, tentatively, lips seeking lips like heart seeking heart. The kiss is soft, kind and fortifying in the way only Clarke could be, and soon her teeth are nipping at his bottom lip in a way that makes every muscle in his body relax for the first time he can remember since they landed on the ground. His tongue sweeps across her lips and his fingers tug at the curls that radiate firelight, and she is tugging at the hem of his shirt and pushing him back against the soft fur of the mattress and leaving kisses down his bare neck and shoulders that leave an entirely new type of scar.

The nightmares still find him the way they always do, but tonight he is calmed by the warm skin that presses against the hollow of his chest and the blonde curls that tickle his nose. He kisses the soft skin of a shoulder and buries his face deep into the crook of her neck, and his breathing begins to slow so quickly that he falls asleep before he realizes it’s happening.

When they embark upon the long trip back to Arkadia, the sky seems just a bit brighter and he thinks he’s able to breathe a bit deeper. And for the first time in a long time, his smile is genuine in response to the sharp quips of the girl barking orders at their group.

Bellamy thinks that he is not okay, and he may never be fully okay again. But he is alive and Clarke Griffin is by his side, and for today, that is enough.


End file.
